Communication devices, such as landline telephones, wireless communication devices and voice-over-IP telephones, offer a user an ever-increasing opportunity to stay connected no matter where the user is. With the increasing travel costs and overall pressures on businesses to control costs, more and more enterprises encourage their employees to conduct so called “virtual meetings” or, in other words, rely on telecommunication devices to conduct meetings. A “conference call” is a feature provided by telecommunication service providers or by dedicated multi-party call solutions providers that enables multiple parties to join a so-called “conference call bridge” to conduct a multi-party call. A multi-party call dial-in number (usually a local access and/or a toll free number) and a multi-party call identifier are assigned to a conference bridge. A multi-party call organizer provides the multi-party call dial-in number and the multi-party call identifier to potential multi-party call participants who are supposed to join the multi-party call. A potential multi-party call participant initiates a call using the multi-party call dial-in number and, once connected to the multi-party call provider, provides the multi-party call identifier which allows the potential multi-party call participant to be connected to the particular multi-party call.
One of the problems associated with existing multi-party call solutions is rather limited means afforded to the multi-party call organizer to control who joins the multi-party call. Some of the existing multi-party call solutions attempt to mitigate the problem by limiting the access to the conference bridge by requesting the potential participants to key in the multi-party call identifier and/or a password. Other existing multi-party call solutions announce the identity of the multi-party call participant who joins the multi-party call, which has been pre-recorded by the multi-party call participant in the process of joining the multi-party call.
Unfortunately, the existing security solutions still suffer from a number of flaws and do not adequately address the problem. For example, with the ever-increasing use of the multi-party call bridges, the multi-party call organizer distributes his or her multi-party call dial-in number and the multi-party call identifier and/or the password to a number of people at various points of time to enable them to join the multi-party call at a particular day and time. Therefore, many people can become aware of the multi-party call dial-in number, the multi-party call identifier and/or password associated with various multi-party call organizers. These multi-party call dial-in numbers and multi-party call identifiers usually do not change, and once assigned to the multi-party call organizer are generally used for years to come. Therefore, individuals with malicious intentions (i.e. those wishing to listen in on someone's multi-party call when they are actually not invited to the multi-party call), having previously legitimately learnt the conference call credentials associated with the multi-party organizer, can later on call into the multi-party call even when they are not supposed to and, thus, join a multi-party call which they are not allowed to join. Even though some multi-party call solutions announce the joining multi-party call participants, when a large number of multi-party call participants join concurrently, as is the case with larger multi-party calls, the multi-party call organizer may not be able to effectively track who has joined. Furthermore, with existing multi-party call solutions, which rely on the multi-party call participant to pre-record his or her name, the joining participants with malicious intentions may pre-record a wrong name.